7 Must Have WordPress Plugins

When it comes to getting the best out of our wordpress blog, you definitely want to have the best wordpress plugins that will give it the most optimization. This is how you get the best of your time, leverage, generating leads and traffic through the plugins. Let’s look at some powerful wordpress plugs that will help you along your journey…

“These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.” ~ Marc Andreessen

If you want to get the best results, with the least of your time, and with the optimal leverage, then using wordpress plugins will fulfill that job. As bloggers we want to make the most out of our blogs. So why not put it to optimal use!

For those of you who are new to blogging, plugins allows you to enhance your blog to make it easier to promote, generate traffic, leads and even sales. That is, if you’re using it to make money or to help you grow a home business.

In this case, why do people blog? It’s one of the great ways to brand yourself instead of your business for the most part. If you’re the type of person that people like and trust, they’re going to follow you no matter what business venture you get involved with. This is why it’s so important to build a good, ethical reputation as well as being a person that always delivers value.

Now what are some of the things that bloggers look for?

They want their content to be share

Bloggers want social proof

They want to build a subscriber list

They want to generate leads by sharing value

They want to aid of search engines to make it easier for their content to be found

They want to make money blogging

They want to keep drawing traffic, leads, and sales from old posts

7 Plugins That Will Give You A Boost

As you’re building your audience as well as subscribers and leads, you want make sure that your readers get the best value possible. When you focus on the success of your readers, you become more successful!

The following 7 plugins are something I recommend to make sure you build a strong following. Some of these plugins are free while others are paid with the option of making affiliate sales:

CommentLuv Premium – This has got to be the ultimate of all plugins. It it first heard about this on a site called comluv.com I really didn’t understand how this would be beneficial. But the fact that I found out how much traffic I was getting through commenting on other blog sites gave me the “Aha” moment.

Commentluv Premium allows you to reward your readers by placing the last blog post they publish after their comments. Now the more reputable, relative comments you get, the more traffic you’re going to get from search engines, social media, other bloggers, and so forth.

Also it has an anti spambot plug called G.A.S.P, it allows you to increase your followers on Twitter, your commenters can have keywords within the name after a certain number of comments, and also you can send a direct reply to those that comment on your posts.

If you really want to start off with a plugin that’s going to increase your rankings, then this is a plugin I highly recommend. For a single site is $67 and for unlimited its $97. With that in mind you can also get 50% of all affiliate sales.

Comment Redirect By Yoast – This plugins refer to those that comments on your page or posts for the first time. This is a great way to send them to a Thank You Page, and also you can ask them to subscribe to your blog, direct them to your facebook page, and much more..

Flare – If you’re looking for a social share bar/buttons, then check out the social share bar to the left side of this blog post. This plugin gives your readers the choice what social media sites they want to share your content in as well as the number of shares you have so far for that post or page.

Nofollow for External Link – One goal of many bloggers is lowering the bounce rate of the blog posts. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site rathan than staying to view other pages.

Now I’ve been writing blogs consistently for over a year, and I thought it was a good idea to have my links open on the same page rather than opening them up in a new window or tab. Well, that doesn’t help the bounce rate and I didn’t feel like going back to each post to change the coding so that the link opens up in a new window and/or tab.

With this plugin it makes it easier for you. This plugin changes the code for you throughout your entire blog in one shot for those links point to sites outside of your blog. This leaves the original page or post open while your readers check out those other sites, hence lowering the bounce rate.

OptinSkin – If you want subscribers and leads, you want to make sure that you have optin forms all over your blog and pages. The OptinSkin plugins allows you add these optin forms anywhere on your blog.

They have templates for you to use in order for you to customize to your liking, and they are a bit more attractive to your readers. You can do spit testing and also it works with the top autoresponders such as Aweber, MailChimp, iContact, GetResponse and more.

You can purchase this plugin for just $67 and also earn 50% of affilate sales!

Tweet Old Post – What more can I say about this plugin! It tweets the old blog posts you created in the past, depending on how much you want it to tweet. I’m not much of a big twitter user, but this is one way to broaden my horizons automatically while I’m doing other income producing activities.

Promotion and sharing great value is the key to growing your audience on your blog as well as generating traffic and leads. This is definitely a plugin you should have in your arsenal!

What Would Seth Godin Do – Now what would he do? Well one things for sure you can customize a welcome page towards your first time visitors and your returning visitors. Now if you look towards the top of this post, you’ll see a “Welcome” message depending on what type of visitor you are.

You can also leave a link to a sites that’s going to provide value and/or also get them subscribe to your blog. It’s another way to build your audience and subscribers. You gotta love these plugins that allow you to do this!

Now It’s Your Turn!

How do you like this list of Plugins? If you have any of them, what are some of your experiences? Are there any other plugins you would recommend? Please share your comments below and share this post with your friends. I look forward to reading them!

Struggling with your home business? Are you confused about how to really market it? Many of you are left in the dark and I like to bring light to you. I like to introduce to you a step-by-step simple formula that has been working for me.

All plugins from this post are very useful and particularly CommentLuv and Tweet Old Post which i think are most important from this list and can add Sociable,Google Analyticator,Wp-Email,NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

You can’t go wrong with Commentluv Premium and Tweet Old Post! This really help puts your information out there, especially if you’ve been consistently building rapport with people! Thanks for your insight!admin recently posted…7 Must Have WordPress Plugins

Solid plugins my friend. The two that I will have to check out on your list are Comment Redirect By Yoast and Nofollow for External Link. Plugins make your life easier and I will take a look at it based on your recommendations. Thanks for sharing Sherman!Nate Leung recently posted…MLM Tips: Seed Planting in Your MLM Network Marketing Business

Thanks for the compliment. Those are definitely some really great plugins to work with! It helps with your bounce rate and keeps your brand in front of your readers and subscribers! Thanks for stopping by!sherman smith recently posted…What Does It Mean To Be Professional?

Great post Sherman and some great plugins. I particularly like the Flare sociable plugin as this looks neat and tidy. I know what I am going to do now !! Thanks for sharing.Merle Gibbins recently posted…Knowing How To Use SEO Content: Keywords & Phrases

Very helpful information and recommendations. I also use CommentLuv and would recommend it. I have also been using Zamanta which offers content recommendations at the end of my posts from other sources who in turn offer my posts on their sites. It also offers an image library which isn’t all that great, and choices of text links, mostly from Wikipedia. The other benefit from this plugin is that it reminds me of opportunities for text links to all the rest of my posts on my blog. I see that you use something called “nrelate,” for content recommendations. How do you like it?Mary Austin recently posted…Network Marketing Tips – Is Facebook Marketing Still Worth Your Time?

Yes Commentluv is a popular plugin that us serious bloggers use to help promote other’s content. I really like it, as well as the versatility of it!

I never heard of Zamanta. That’s a great feature that it offers recommendations and also offer your posts on their sites as well. That’s like killing two birds with one stone. I definitely like nrelate for it’s simplicity and you can customize to only show specific blogs relating to certain categories.

Yes plugins tend to make life a lot easier. On the same token, I try not to install too many because they can definitely slow down your load time!sherman smith recently posted…Don’t Be An Asshole! Be Approachable!

Out of all the plugins, I just love my CommentLuv Premium! Once that was installed, my spam cut down. But the best is that I can choose what post I want to leave when I’m commenting on someone’s blog. I just love it!

Besides that, I have to look into flares….I’ve seen it and don’t have it yet. Seems to me this is something that is beneficial.

Thanks for sharing these plugins and explaining exactly what they do. And you have explained it in terms that I can understand…that’s important to me.

I love plug-ins and am forever exploring and trying them out – like decorating the home! Ones I love that you didn’t mention are Pretty Link, Broken Link Checker and a premium one for social sharing – Pulsehover.
Really cool post Sherman 🙂
P.S. Remember new installers – if you use Tweet Old Post to keep your post links updated and remove out of date ones – I’ve been caught out a few times!!
JacsJacs Henderson recently posted…Loving This Plugin ~ PulseHover ~ Because A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Thats a great analogy. it is like decorating a home. I never heard of the plugins you mention and may have to check them out. I try not to install too many plugins because it does effect your blog in a negative way. For me it slows down the load time. They say coding is better in that case.

Thanks for the reminder! It doesn’t look great to look “out-of-date”! Nobody wants to be the square. Thanks for your commentsherman smith recently posted…Don’t Be An Asshole! Be Approachable!

Ah plugins, we definitely can’t live without them these days can we. They just make our lives so much easier.

The only one I use that’s on your list is CommentLuv Premium. You KNOW it’s my all time favorite and I stand behind it 100% still to this day. Andy is doing his best to continue to improve it’s features although spam seems to be out of hand these days.

I don’t use a lot of plugins for convenience sake, I prefer to code it if possible. And no I’m not a coder but I can definitely follow instructions and my theme is so easy to add code.

I know a lot of plugins make things simpler but I think less is best. That’s just me.

Thanks for sharing this list and it’s good to learn what others use and recommend.

Commentluv premium is my all time favorite so far! You can never go wrong with it. It’s definitely a win/win type of plugin.

I can definitely understand why you don’t want a lot of plugins. I had to deactivate and uninstall a lot of plugins myself. As soon as I started doing that, my blog posts started loading faster and I had a lot less conflicts with other plugins. That definitely lifting a lot of weight off my shoulders.

But they are definitely a convenient way to optimize your blog! I also want to look for other ways to use code in place of some of my plugins! If it is possible to use code to make the best out of our blogs, then I’m there to listen!

Hello Sherman,
You have indeed dropped some good plugins here which i know they are great.
Among your list, i am only using 2 among the plugins you mentioned here. The commentluv and the nofollow for external links. I woulda love to try out some more but i have reach my plugin limit.

I love your list of plugins. The only one I currently use of that list is CommentLuv Premium and I love it. I do have something like the flare share buttons on my site. What I may add is the one that shares old blog posts.

Thanks for sharing this useful information to make our blogs gain ranking in the search engines.

Thanks! You can’t go wrong when you have Commentluv Premium. It has so many features that can benefit your blog as well as showcase the readers that comment on yours. This makes it a win/win plugin for both parties.

Yes definitely tweet old post is a great plugin to leverage! This is something I believe everyone should have because it kills two birds with one stone!

Thanks for the compliment. Those are two great plugins. I happen to run into nofollow for external links plugin looking for ways to lower my bounce rate, which helped me do so! Yes I’m like you, I try to keep my plugins at a limit for my blog’s sake 😉 Thanks for stopping by!sherman smith recently posted…Why Are People Turned Off By Home Business Opportunities